EDWARD ABBEY: STANDING TOUGH IN THE DESERT

Published: May 7, 1989

Edward Abbey, who died in March at the age of 62, seemed, at his best, the nonpareil ''nature writer'' of recent decades. It was a term he came to detest, a term used to pigeonhole and marginalize some of the more intriguing American writers who are dealing with matters central to us - yet it can be a ticket to oblivion in the bookstores. Joyce Carol Oates, for instance, in a slapdash though interesting essay called ''Against Nature,'' speaks of nature writers' ''painfully limited set of responses . . . REVERENCE, AWE, PIETY, MYSTICAL ONENESS.'' She must never have read Edward Abbey; yet it was characteristic of him that for an hour or two, he might have agreed.

He wrote with exceptional exactitude and an unusually honest and logical understanding of causes and consequences, but he also loved argument, churlishness and exaggeration. Personally, he was a labyrinth of anger and generosity, shy but arresting because of his mixture of hillbilly and cowboy qualities, and even when silent he appeared bigger than life. He had hitchhiked from Appalachia for the first time at age 17 to what became an immediate love match with the West, and, I'm sure, slept out more nights under the stars than all of his current competitors combined. He was uneven and self-indulgent as a writer and often scanted his talent by working too fast. But he had about him an authenticity that springs from the page and is beloved by a rising generation of readers, who have enabled his early collection of rambles, ''Desert Solitaire'' (1968), to run through 18 printings in mass-market paperback. His fine comic novel, ''The Monkey Wrench Gang'' (1975), has sold half a million copies. Both books, indeed, have inspired a new eco-guerrilla environmental organization called Earth First!, whose other patron saint is Ned Ludd (from whom the Luddites took their name), though it's perhaps no more radical than John Muir's Sierra Club appeared to be when that organization was formed in 1892.

Like many good writers, Abbey dreamed of producing ''the fat masterpiece,'' as he called the ''nubble'' that he had worked on for the past dozen years and that was supposed to boil everything down to a thousand pages or so. When edited in half, it came out last fall as ''The Fool's Progress,'' an autobiographical yarn that lunges cross-country several times, full of apt descriptions and antic fun - ''Ginger Man'' stuff - though not with the coherence or poignance he had hoped for. A couple of his other novels hold up fairly well, too: ''Black Sun'' and ''The Brave Cowboy,'' which came out in movie form starring Kirk Douglas and Walter Matthau in 1962 (''Lonely Are the Brave'') and brought Abbey a munificent $7,500.

I do think he wrote masterpieces, but they were more slender: the essays in ''Desert Solitaire'' and an equivalent sampler that you might put together from subsequent collections like ''Down the River,'' ''Beyond the Wall'' and ''The Journey Home.'' His rarest strength was in being concise, because he really knew what he thought and cared for. He loved the desert - ''red mountains like mangled iron'' - liked people in smallish clusters, and didn't mince words in saying that industrial rapine, glitz-malls and tract-sprawl were an abomination heralding more devastating events. While writing as handsomely as others do, he never lost sight of the fact that much of Creation is rapidly being destroyed.

''Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell,'' he wrote. And he adopted for a motto Walt Whitman's line: ''Resist much, obey little.'' Another motto was Thoreau's summary in ''Walden'': ''If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?''

Abbey traveled less than some writers, but it is not necessary to go dithering around our suffering planet, visiting the Amazon, Indonesia, Bhutan and East Africa. The crisis is plain in anyone's neck of the woods, and the exoticism of globe-trotting may only blur one's vision. Nor do we need to become mystical Transcendentalists and commune with God. (''One Life at a Time, Please'' is another of Abbey's titles. On his hundreds of camping trips he tended to observe and enjoy the wilds rather than submerge his soul.) What is needed is honesty, a pair of eyes and a dollop of fortitude to spit the truth out, not genuflecting to Emersonian optimism, or journalistic traditions of staying deadpan, or the saccharine pressures of magazine editors who want their readers to feel good. Emerson would be roaring with heartbreak and Thoreau would be raging with grief in these 1980's. Where were you when the world burned? Get mad, for a change, for heaven's sake! I believe they would say to compatriots of Abbey's like Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez and John McPhee.

Abbey didn't sell to the big book clubs or reach best-sellerdom or collect major prizes. When, at 60, he was offered a smallish one by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he rejected it with a fanfare of rhetoric, probably because it had come too late. So the success, wholly word-of-mouth, of ''The Monkey Wrench Gang'' in paperback pleased him more than anything else, and he delighted in telling friends who the real-life counterparts were for its characters, Seldom Seen Smith, Bonnie Abbzug and George Washington Hayduke. They too had torn down billboards, yanked up survey stakes, poured sand into bulldozer gas tanks and sabotaged ''certain monstrosities'' in fragilely scenic regions.